Summa: diary (April 5-10, 2025)
‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle …’.
April 5 (Saturday) – April 6 (Sunday). Passiontide.
April 7 (Monday). 8.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Studiology. Over the weekend, the full six-bell sequence was prepared for further processing, on the large rig. The ‘dry’ output will be modified using a variety of reverberation filters, principally, in a bid to tease out resonances that are currently on the periphery of audibility. ‘Subtlety’ is the watchword. Each pass of the process is in real time: 18+ minutes.
Meanwhile, I set about choosing photographic and film stills of the Aberfan disaster from my archive in readiness for processing visually. Two nights back, I had a dream. In it, I fed printouts of images through a paper shredder. On awaking, it struck me that this was, effectively, what I’d be doing with the musical sound samples used in the project. This gift from my subconscious was worth acting upon. In the background, I kept an eye on stock markets’ response to US trade tariffs, as they opened around the world after the weekend.
1.45 pm: ‘What are you listening out for, John?’, pressed the inner-tutor. ‘I’ll know it when I hear it’, I replied (kicking the question into the long grass). This I do know: I want to hear simplicity; 216 chimes, with no development other than the order of the notes. 3.30 pm: I secured a mix-down of the composition that I could live with … for now. It was uploaded to my John Harvey: Sound site, so that I could hear the piece as would an audience.
The cherry blossom in the garden has come into bloom early this year. I admire this tree. While it came with the property I purchased, I cannot bring myself to call it mine. It’s unpossessable. You can see it from afar — burning like a torch in the sunlight.
April 8 (Tuesday). 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studiology. Having listened to the Six Bells [working title] mix-down, I could not live with it any longer. As I anticipated (but, for some reason, refused to accept initially), the ‘dry’ or unmodulated version of the composition — the simplest form — was the best. I could hear completeness from the outset, and yet wouldn’t trust my instinct — even though its impact upon me had been so immediate and profound. For the first time, a composition was rendered entirely in mono.
9.30 am: I reviewed the structure of the Aberfan [working title] project, and made changes where improvements could be conceived. Sometimes, we fail to exceed our best, not for want of either ability or trying, but due to a lack of sufficient imagination. 10.45 am: Sourcing a switch box for the large rig to enable both the turntable and a laptop to be inserted into the signal chain of the large rig, either separately or together. 11.00 am: Working with wind. ‘Think in terms of a scene — a landscape — John!’ He was right (once again); I hear a sound more clearly when I visualise either a place or prospect (in my mind’s-eye) associated with its origin. Where am I standing in this picture? What do I see around me? How far are the sounds away? How are they organised in space, depth, and the round? Which sounds dominate? It’s a method of audiolisation that I initiated when acoustically imagining the soundscape implied by Jean-Françoise Millet’s The Angelus (1857-9).
1.45 pm: A review of the morning’s work: the sound of a distant choir drifting on the wind. 2.45 pm: After a little tweaking and peaking, I re-opened the project’s ‘industrial’ sounds archive. The story of the Aberfan disaster begins with the sinking of Merthyr Vale Colliery over a hundred years earlier, in 1869, the extraction of coal, and the production of spoil, heaped up as tips (seen in the background of the photograph below), one of which avalanched down on the community. This pre-history of that terrible event requires articulation too.
April 9 (Wednesday). 8.00 am: Studiology. Every once and a while, a piano interior inserts itself into my practice. When I was a second year undergraduate fine art student, I single-handedly schlepped the interior of a heavy upright piano, covered in a blanket, for a mile and a half downhill from the donor’s house to my studio in the art college at Newport, Gwent. It became my occasional muse over the next two years.
Today, I opended the family upright, the strings of which I plucked and strummed with a plectrum made from tusk of a mammoth elephant — thus connecting 6.2 million years of materials and technology. 9.30 am: Processing. The resultant sounds are engaging, but may not prove serviceable. Rather than rush to judgement and shoehorn them into the suite, I will live with their sonorities for a few hours.
My old friend, the composer, musician, writer, minister, and teacher Dr Robert Atkins, introduced me to a remarkable story that I’d never before heard. One evening in March 1967, the American guitarist Jimi Hendrix was driven from London to the site of the Aberfan disaster. It’s said that he dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. Hendrix had been in the UK since September 24, 1966, and was in London when the tragedy struck, on October 21 of that year. Two days later his band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, recorded their first song, ‘Hey Joe’. The other ‘image’ I received in Saturday night’s dream had me playing an electric guitar on one of the Aberfan [working title] suite’s compositions. For the life of me, I couldn’t (on waking) imagine how to rationalise or justify the instrument’s inclusion. Now I do. I listened to Hendrix’s rendering of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, from his performance at Woodstock in 1969. In these turbulent times for the US, his agonised guitar solo still captures the zeitgeist.
11.30 am: I updated the timeline of the suite’s compositions — which now covers over a hundred and fifty years — and reviewed yesterday’s work on the compositions.
1.45 pm: Hardware installation. I returned to a composition that is developing around the concept of the final school assembly prior to the disaster. There was no assembly on the day the tip slipped; the avalanche descended some 15 minutes before it would’ve begun.
April 10 (Thursday). 8.00 am, and for the remainder of the morning: Research admin. Looking for sponsors, with assistance from Dr Dafydd Roberts, one of the university’s Research Development Officers. There is so little money in the system these days, other than for very large-scale projects. My ambitions are comparatively small. I need money enough for a song, rather than for an opera.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice